User blog:Gojirob/I kind of felt like Kouta...
A couple of years ago, I took some help from my mother and signed up for courses in Medical Coding and Billing. After about a year, I passed my two initial courses, being Anatomy and Biology. Then came CPB Training itself. I swear, some force beyond our understanding seemed to not want me to focus on this. I could not turn a corner in 2016 and for much of 2017 without something getting in the way, not the least of which were my own doubts, and lack of self-confidence. I all but gave up a few times. My personal life (a new job site to adjust to as my company transferred to a larger facility, my father's terminal illness and ultimate passing almost a year ago, aiding both my parents with projects, having to try and improve my health after getting some bad numbers) joined with the noted difficulty of learning ICD-10 and CPT coding (HCPCS was actually easy by comparison) to put me badly off my mark. 2016 and 2017 came and went without me making any real progress and wondering if I was cut out for this. Then came an email in late December of 2017. The course was ending, as in going away, as in not able to be taken anymore, as of the end of this very month - technically April 1st, but that's Easter Sunday, and that means family, no questions asked. I decided that, if I had to tell my Mom her gift had been squandered, it would be from having failed, not from not even trying. I at last hunkered down and found means and methods to get past my problems. I used all the resources the course had to offer. I copied and pasted my exam results, so I could learn from my errors. I went online for practice questions some sites had. I cursed and screamed a lot. I wrote back to the course supplier and told them some of the questions were very badly phrased. I even encountered more outside problems delaying me. After two months, I had everything done except the final exam. The final was tougher. My method of searching the downloaded chapters for answers wouldn't work as well, given that chapter reviews were 25 questions in 2 Hours, and the final was 100 questions in 4. There ended up being three questions I fumbled, and I added those to my wrong answer archive, with one of them being one of those questions I mentioned that seemed poorly phrased. In this case, I felt it lacked the specific information needed to find the right code to match what was needed. The other two I plan to look up, since they just eluded me. I wasn't anywhere near as ready as I had hoped. And yet I managed to complete the four hour exam in two hours and fifty minutes, with a score of 97/100. In other words, I passed. Because I had taken the two weeks inbetween the final chapter and the final exam and used my second attempt on many of the chapters where I had less than 100, I was able to raise my course grade to 97.1. Now, I look fwd to the state exam on May 19th. That will be my gateway to a new job, the least of which will pay 50% more than what I make right now. So while I did better than Kouta, I get how he must have felt, waiting for his college approvals. Category:Blog posts